An Ethics of Critique: from Nomadology to Anarcheology

Abstract

It has now been almost 50 years since Derrida gave his assessment of the state of philosophy in France in “The Ends of Man” . He was looking back at the post-War generation who were already, within a mere 20 years, beginning to be displaced by the generation of Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, and others. What marks out that emerging generation and its milieu is something that Derrida calls a “trembling” (EM, 133). This trembling, this tremblement de terre, this earthquake, was shaking the foundations of the secure co-belonging of ‘man’ and Being. It was threatening to sweep away not only the great systems of Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger but also the last vestiges of humanism in Sartrean phenomenology and existentialism. At the end of the essay, Derrida identifies three signs that mark the effects of this trembling. These are: 1) the reduction of meaning (to “a ‘formal’ organization which in itself has no meaning”); 2) the gamble that we can open up to an outside through new styles of writing and thinking; 3) the “increasingly insistent and increasingly rigorous recourse to Nietzsche”. In this paper I will take some of these lines and follow them – through Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Foucault.